Radar School

It's probably time to say a bit more about the "Air Traffic Control Radar Repair" program at Keesler AFB back in 1973. I really don't remember that much about it because each day was pretty much the same as the one before, but there were a few highlights.

A quick recap: The classes were conducted in the old Cody Hall, and it was the longest training course at Keesler at the time (ran for about 6 months after Basic Electronics). I spent that entire time on "A shift", meaning I attended school from 6AM to noon, and (supposedly) there was a lot of homework, but I certainly don't remember doing any (and I was an honor graduate - still have the certificate somewhere).

The program was broken into 2 or 3 week sections (each covering a major radar subsystem) with a smattering of telephone, radio and air conditioning stuff thrown in at the end. Basically, we spent all day sitting at our tables annotating schematics with colored pencils while the instructor explained the operation of the circuits... Each section was taught by a different instructor - some were Air Force sergeants and some civil servants (retired military).

Now - the instructors loved to mess with the students, and it wasn't always clear when they were doing it. For example:
There were some push-pull amplifiers where the vacuum tube symbols were drawn as vertical pairs - one right side up and the other upside down. The instructor told us to label the upside down ones as "gravitrons" because they were actually mounted upside down in the cabinet so gravity could aid the electron flow. (I didn't write that particular one down, but some of the other guys did)... Then there were the "high-tide wobulators" (there really is such a thing as a wobulator, but not in our equipment, and they are definitely not affected by tides.) However, the "quadrature detectors" and the "Walman low noise circuits" turned out to be real, so you just never knew... I'm sure there were lots more, but I've mercifully forgotten them...

And speaking of humor, there was one incident that I found particularly amusing:
During one of our classes (taught by a young sergeant) an old civilian instructor burst through the door and said:
    "I'm sorry to interrupt the class, but I've got some bad news"
    Sarge: "What's going on?"
    Civilian: "Well, it's going to be tough sledding...  Really tough sledding..."
    Sarge: "OK... Why?"
    Civilian: "I'm telling you... It's going to be tough sledding... That's all I can say..."
This went on for another 20 or 30 seconds, and finally this happened:
    Sarge: "Will you just please tell me why it's going to be tough sledding?"
    Civilian: "Well... It's the middle of July... There's no snow"
Then he turned around and walked out without cracking a smile...

Yeah - that old guy was our instructor for one of the later sections and he definitely had an "interesting" sense of humor. He suffered from early stage Parkinson's disease (which affects your balance and coordination) and told this hilarious story about getting stopped for drunk driving. (It was mostly "physical shtick" so it doesn't lend itself to retelling.) We definitely had some good times :-)

Finally - my earlier mention of quadrature detectors reminds me of a story that doesn't really belong here, but it speaks volumes about the military in general and there really isn't a better place to tell it:

The quadrature detector circuit consisted of 4 vacuum tubes (in a bridge arrangement) that had to be perfectly matched or the circuit wouldn't work. Hence, if any one of the tubes went bad you had to replace all 4 of them, so (naturally) every maintenance group always stocked at least that many (preferably all with the same batch number)...

Then around the time I left Keesler some doofus at the Pentagon ran a bunch of computer analysis on the Air Force parts inventory and determined that (based on average failure rate) nobody should need more than 2 of those particular tubes in stock, so they forced everyone to turn in their "excess" inventory. (I leaned about this while doing some work at Travis AFB in 1974 - story yet to come.)
Now, if this had happened in the "real world" someone would have sent a memo up the chain explaining why stocking only 2 tubes was idiotic, but in the "military world" there is simply no provision for challenging orders, so the restriction remained in place...
The funny thing was, you were still expected to get your job done. Saying "I can't fix the system because you took my parts away" was not an acceptable answer...
And there were similar issues with our filing system. Most of the records were required to be disposed of after 6 months, but then you'd invariably get a call from NorthCom HQ asking for specifics about something that happened 9 months earlier, and responding with "I have no clue" was not an option.

The end result was that most everyone had stashes of things they weren't supposed to have, and whenever you needed something that wasn't readily available through "official" channels there were "scroungers" who somehow managed to make things appear... So, basically, the system worked despite itself :-)

But those stories are yet to come...